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Calling bullshit on your own post might be a smarter idea. Just because it's not intuitive to you doesn't mean it's not mathematically sound. Your post amounts

Calling bullshit on your own post might be a smarter idea. Just because it's not intuitive to you doesn't mean it's not mathematically sound. Your post amounts to "I don't understand statistics or what the hell this article is talking about, therefore I'm going to be suspicious of it."

scscsc 17y ago
Negative. It is intuitive (and wrong). It is not mathematically sound. He does understand statistics. The point he's making is that the author of the article chose the metrics after the act. There are tons of such metrics to use; if you are not honest, you can search for the ones that prove your point.
WilliamLP 17y ago
It's not that difficult an idea, even if the trend of comment voting here indicates a disturbing ignorance of how statistics can be manipulated. What would be mathematically sound would be to agree on a standard set of tests, perhaps including Benford's law, digit distribution, two digit combinations shown to be popular when humans pick numbers at random. And to do so _BEFORE THE DATA HAVE BEEN AVAILABLE_. How would I trick people into believing a false conclusion? One way would be to find 30 or so measures of what could suggest suspicious patterns. Then I'd test the data with them, and perhaps there would be 2 which have a 5% chance of occurring purely by chance. Then I say "Aha! Look at this! The chance of these two things happening are .05 * 0.05 or practically impossible!" Apparently I could fool some pretty smart people this way, since they obviously aren't immune to basic statistical fallacy. As another poster said, none of this suggests that the data weren't manipulated, but just that the stats in the article, as given, are purely bullshit.
- kvh 17y ago
  For instance, the same authors, in a previous paper analyzing nigerian election results, state the following "lab experiments indicate that individuals tend to favor small numbers, even when subjects have incentives to properly randomize. Second, individuals underestimate the likelihood of digit repetition in sequences of random integers, so we should observe relatively fewer instances of repeated numbers in manipulated vote tallies." there is no mention of either of these statistics in the Iran analysis.
- itistoday 17y ago
  You raise an interesting point, but I'm not sure I buy this argument. What is the chance that your scenario is realistic? In other words, what is the chance that given a set of legitimate vote counts, and a set of 30 known legitimate authenticity tests, that 2 of those tests would report a value of 5%? It could turn out that if the set of 30 tests are all "good tests", then the chance of your being able to find 2 tests that report low numbers like that approaches 0%, in which case you would simply be wrong. I am not a statistician, and statistics is notoriously difficult for humans to deal with [1], so until I find an answer to the question above I'm going to maintain a neutral position in this argument. Unless you happen to have a doctorate in statistics, in which case I will take your word for it. ;-) [1] TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_donnelly_shows_how_stats_fool_juries.html http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_donnelly_shows_how_stats_fool...
  - jibiki 17y ago
    It's easier to compute the probability that less than 2 tests report a value of 5%. This is: (30 choose 0)*(.95^30) + (30 choose 1)*(.95^29)*(.05^1) = 0.553542075 So there's about a 50-50 chance (obviously I'm assuming that the tests are independent of each other.) The relevant Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_distribution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_distribution
    - itistoday 17y ago
      "less than 2"? Assuming you're doing the math correctly, it means that there's a 50-50 chance that "0 or 1" of the tests "report a value of 5%" (and does that mean less than or equal to 5%?). Which, again, doesn't say very much... The question was: What is the chance of being able to find exactly 2 tests?
      - jibiki 17y ago
        > The question was: What is the chance of being able to find exactly 2 tests Sure thing. That's: (30 choose 2) * (.95^28) * (.05^2) = 0.258636738 I thought you meant "at least two tests", for obvious reasons. (If 4 tests showed vote rigging, the researchers would still report vote rigging...) > (and does that mean less than or equal to 5%?) Yes.

scscsc 17y ago

Negative. It is intuitive (and wrong). It is not mathematically sound. He does understand statistics. The point he's making is that the author of the article chose the metrics after the act. There are tons of such metrics to use; if you are not honest, you can search for the ones that prove your point.

WilliamLP 17y ago

It's not that difficult an idea, even if the trend of comment voting here indicates a disturbing ignorance of how statistics can be manipulated. What would be mathematically sound would be to agree on a standard set of tests, perhaps including Benford's law, digit distribution, two digit combinations shown to be popular when humans pick numbers at random. And to do so _BEFORE THE DATA HAVE BEEN AVAILABLE_. How would I trick people into believing a false conclusion? One way would be to find 30 or so measures of what could suggest suspicious patterns. Then I'd test the data with them, and perhaps there would be 2 which have a 5% chance of occurring purely by chance. Then I say "Aha! Look at this! The chance of these two things happening are .05 * 0.05 or practically impossible!" Apparently I could fool some pretty smart people this way, since they obviously aren't immune to basic statistical fallacy. As another poster said, none of this suggests that the data weren't manipulated, but just that the stats in the article, as given, are purely bullshit.

kvh 17y ago
For instance, the same authors, in a previous paper analyzing nigerian election results, state the following "lab experiments indicate that individuals tend to favor small numbers, even when subjects have incentives to properly randomize. Second, individuals underestimate the likelihood of digit repetition in sequences of random integers, so we should observe relatively fewer instances of repeated numbers in manipulated vote tallies." there is no mention of either of these statistics in the Iran analysis.
itistoday 17y ago
You raise an interesting point, but I'm not sure I buy this argument. What is the chance that your scenario is realistic? In other words, what is the chance that given a set of legitimate vote counts, and a set of 30 known legitimate authenticity tests, that 2 of those tests would report a value of 5%? It could turn out that if the set of 30 tests are all "good tests", then the chance of your being able to find 2 tests that report low numbers like that approaches 0%, in which case you would simply be wrong. I am not a statistician, and statistics is notoriously difficult for humans to deal with [1], so until I find an answer to the question above I'm going to maintain a neutral position in this argument. Unless you happen to have a doctorate in statistics, in which case I will take your word for it. ;-) [1] TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_donnelly_shows_how_stats_fool_juries.html http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_donnelly_shows_how_stats_fool...
- jibiki 17y ago
  It's easier to compute the probability that less than 2 tests report a value of 5%. This is: (30 choose 0)*(.95^30) + (30 choose 1)*(.95^29)*(.05^1) = 0.553542075 So there's about a 50-50 chance (obviously I'm assuming that the tests are independent of each other.) The relevant Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_distribution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_distribution
  - itistoday 17y ago
    "less than 2"? Assuming you're doing the math correctly, it means that there's a 50-50 chance that "0 or 1" of the tests "report a value of 5%" (and does that mean less than or equal to 5%?). Which, again, doesn't say very much... The question was: What is the chance of being able to find exactly 2 tests?
    - jibiki 17y ago
      > The question was: What is the chance of being able to find exactly 2 tests Sure thing. That's: (30 choose 2) * (.95^28) * (.05^2) = 0.258636738 I thought you meant "at least two tests", for obvious reasons. (If 4 tests showed vote rigging, the researchers would still report vote rigging...) > (and does that mean less than or equal to 5%?) Yes.